Daddy Issues

The pope (el papa) is only coming to Madrid, and he's only coming for something like 72 hours. But you wouldn't know it from the fuss everyone is making. Pilgrims from Chile are camped out in school gyms; the police kicked the Indignados of the Puerta del Sol weeks ago; there's pope coverage on the news every day -- and he's not even here yet. (Actually, by the time you read this he probably will be, but the hype has been going on for weeks.) There's a big banner on the Bilbao cathedral welcoming the (friggin') papa, even though he's not coming anywhere near the Basque country. It blows my mind a little that in this place where people apparently didn't much care that Spain won the World Cup, they're excited (some of them, anyway) that the friggin' papa is coming to Madrid. But, I don't much understand religion at all. I tend to associate being religious with being uptight about, well, basically everything (partly because I'm kind of an elitist agnostic asshole, and partly because where I come from a lot of religious people are uptight about a lot of things), and since people here aren't uptight at all by my neurotic East Coast standards, I forget that they are mostly Catholic and that, to varying degrees, religion matters to them. (That sentence was way too long. Sorry.)

Some people are complaining. Not about the church's anti-condom stance, which kills people by promoting the spread of AIDS, or its abhorrent handling of its montón de pedophile priests. I take that back -- probably someone somewhere on the Iberian peninsula is complaining about those things. But the complaints that are getting news coverage are about money. The Spanish economy is shit; the whole European economy could collapse any minute now; no one has a job; and the Catholic church is rich -- but still it's the Spanish government that's paying most of the 50ish million euros that this visit is going to cost. (There will be a helicopter overhead monitoring the entire visit, and apparently that alone costs thousands of euros per hour. Incidentally, helicóptero is one of my favorite examples of an actual Spanish word that sounds like Spanglish.) The people complaining on the news always make a point to say that they are Catholic and they love the papa, they just don't think the government should be paying for him.

There's an easy solution: Make him camp out with the Chilean pilgrims. It would cost less, which would make the Spaniards happy. It would definitely make the Chilean pilgrims happy. And if the friggin' papa himself doesn't like it, he doesn't have to come. That would at least probably make the Indigenos a little happier -- they'd still be unemployed and smelly, but at least they'd probably get the Puerta del Sol back.